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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Meanwhile Darwin's Fairy Tales keeps cranking them out!

Posted on January 10, 2012 in Awards, Biology, Darwin and Evolution, Dumb Ideas, Fossils, Genetics, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Origin of Life, Origins
We all know the proverbial “snow job.” That’s putting on an entertaining song and dance without doing the assignment. A college sophomore (wise fool) writes a 15-page term paper full of jargon that, on closer inspection, didn’t follow directions or didn’t answer the question – it reveals ignorance of the subject. A job applicant makes an impression with humor or appearance without demonstrating ability to do the work. A junior makes up a fanciful story to cover up why he didn’t mow the lawn. Scientists are supposed to explain things based on observation and testable hypotheses. If Darwinians really believe that an unguided, impersonal, purposeless mechanism led to the diversity of life on Earth, they need to show the evidence. Here are a few recent examples of evolutionary explanations. Check whether they “show” evolution, or distract attention with a “snow” job.

Introducing: TNA! (ta-daah). An article on New Scientist purports to show that you don’t need to start life with the familiar DNA or RNA. A “simpler” molecule called TNA that uses threose instead of ribose might have gotten things started. In fact, the early earth might have been a “hodge-podge world” of many different molecules that could store genetic information. The imagination goes wild with the possibilities.

Only by getting into the nitty-gritty of the article do you come to realize that this is all guesswork. (1) TNA is “not found in nature today.” (2) TNA “would not have arisen on its own.” (3) There is “no trace of TNA or its cousins in modern organisms.” (4) “no one has actually made it in the conditions that existed on Earth before life began….” (5) John Chaput and team at U. of Arizona intelligently designed TNA molecules and “evolved them” in their lab with purpose and intent. (6) “Chaput points out that we still know very little about what TNA can do, because the technology to evolve the molecules in the lab is so new.” Yet reporter Michael Marshall titled his exploration of TNA, “Before DNA, before RNA: Life in the hodge-podge world.” Did he show any life?

Witness evolution in an English quarry: Reporter Carl Yapp of the BBC News is going to “shed light” on evolution through amazingly-preserved fossils found in an abandoned quarry. They’re 450 million years old, he tells us. Eagerly, the reader looks into the quarry for the evolution, with the powerful flashlight beam Yapp is holding, and sees amazing things: complex hydroids (related to sea anemones), chambered nautiloids, sponges – a whole “community that was entirely new and surprising.” These animals, the reader learns, were buried alive so quickly that they fossilized intact – a unique, “spectacular,” “astonishing” collection of animals, some so delicate they rarely fossilize.

Yapp said, “Scientists believe they shed new light on how ocean communities have evolved.”

Sufficiently dazzled by the fossils, the impatient reader asks about the promised evidence for evolution, only to hear paleontologist Dr. Lucy Muir say (watch for the operative word imagined):

“It’s not a discovery that you can point to and say: ‘This proves such-and-such,’” said Dr Muir.

“Rather, it’s a question of adding a large new chunk of knowledge, and in turn suggesting that there are many more chunks left to find.

“This type of ecological community type was simply unknown from rocks this old, and for it to suddenly appear makes palaeontologists wonder what else they’ve been missing.

“It shows us that Ordovician ecosystems were even more diverse and complicated than we imagined.”

Your inner fish, v.2: Alfred Romer’s old idea of fish evolving legs as they hopped between drying desert ponds is implausible. Tiktaalik is a has-been. But now, thank Charles Darwin, “A new theory emerges for where some fish became four-limbed creatures.” Let’s let PhysOrg set the stage from a University of Oregon press release:

A small fish crawling on stumpy limbs from a shrinking desert pond is an icon of can-do spirit, emblematic of a leading theory for the evolutionary transition between fish and amphibians. This theorized image of such a drastic adaptation to changing environmental conditions, however, may, itself, be evolving into a new picture.

Hero of the new “evolving…picture” is University of Oregon scientist Gregory J. Retallack. He’s motivated to provide a new “scenario,” because “such a plucky hypothetical ancestor of ours probably could not have survived the overwhelming odds of perishing in a trek to another shrinking pond.” So out with the old, in with the new: the ancestor wasn’t in a desert after all. It was in a jungle. “Judging from where their fossils were found, transitional forms between fish and amphibians lived in wooded floodplains,” Retallack explains. “Our distant ancestors were not so much foolhardy, as opportunistic, taking advantage of floodplains and lakes choked with roots and logs for the first time in geological history.”

Now, the evidence, please. It sounds too good to be true: “eight-foot-long, 395-million-year-old tetrapods in ancient lagoonal mud in southeastern Poland.” Wow! That would be the evolutionary fossil find of the century. PhysOrg informs us that the tetrapods were announced a year ago – Oh, that was the story about tetrapod tracks we reported on 1/06/2010 (to be making tetrapod tracks, they had to be tetrapods, not fish). The reader looks for other corroborating evidence, such as Softpedia.com, only to find that Retallack studied “ancient soils,” not actual tetrapods. The soils had “tracks” of fish and other animals that he assumes were evolving. This is old news, anyway; the actual paper in the Journal of Geology came out last May. The abstract didn’t announce any new tetrapod transitional forms; just fossilized soils where he thought showed the transition took place. “A woodland hypothesis of evolution is presented here,” the paper says. So why did this make news in late December on PhysOrg? Elementary; it’s the theory, you recall, that is evolving, not necessarily the fish. But that’s OK; finish with a rhetorical flourish, and no one will notice: “The Darwin fish of chrome adorning many car trunks represents a particular time and place in the long evolutionary history of life on earth.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Darwinists are adept at avoiding the evidence and devising important-sounding phrases that are neither supported by evidence or nearly as powerful as they sound. I have learned this from years of reading the comments threads. A recent doozy, which I will dissect carefully:

What we call "life" is an emergent property of a sufficiently-complex, self-sustaining chemical system. That's all, there ain't no more. How complex is "sufficiently?" No one knows. Quite possibly, no one ever will. "

Darwinists cannot define life. They cannot identify it as a natural force, element or substance.

There is no evidence for the word, "emergent" which is meaningless in context. This is because the Law of Biogenesis remains true, there is no life "emerging" from anything other than their parents.

Sufficiently-complex? How does Darwinism get credit for this? Darwinism would lead you to expect very simple organisms with very little variety. As long as it had life and could reproduce it would likely remain what it is. But then that is presuming that it can arise from natural causes, which we have proved over and over does not happen.

Self-sustaining CHEMICAL system? There is far more than chemistry going on and, in fact, basic chemistry works to prohibit the raw materials of life from forming at the same time, even if there was a way to assemble them together and stuff them full of all that information that has no natural source.

As I wrote back in 2005 and as David L. Abel's work has affirmed, the simplest life form that exists independently and reproduces is Mycoplasma genitaliumwith a 580-kilo-base-pair genome containing 470 genes.

Actually, plenty of people know that God created life, which is why it is not something that, " No one knows. Quite possibly, no one ever will." Now what kind of science gives up before it starts? It all makes sense. Naturalists have recognized that the cannot come from natural sources and so they prefer to pretend no one can know rather than admit that organisms are obviously designed.

Specified Complexity and Irreducible Complexity and sourceless Information and Meta-Information already kill off old Darwinist hopes that cells were simple blobs of protoplasm that could easily arise by chance. Nope. Not even close to close! The brilliant four-digit code of DNA/RNA and it's interaction with the cell requires engineering beyond humanity to reproduce at that time. The Intellect Who devised such organisms does inspire me to worship and view Him with awe and for good reasons...

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour